this Quora post on Jordan Peterson:

“
Jordan Peterson suffers from two problems: Nobelitis and a desperate need for approval.

“Nobelitis” is a term for a condition where people who become famous or highly regarded in one particular discipline start beliving that they are super-duper smart geniuses and therefore every stray thought that passes idly through their heads must be super-duper genius Revealed Truth™.

It originally applied to Nobel Prize winners, like Linus Pauling, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and then went completely bonkers and started spouting all kinds of inane pseudoscience bullshit about how massive doses of Vitamin C could cure everything from cancer to schizophrenia, or William Shockley, who won the Nobel Prize in physics and then spent the last years of his life on a weird-ass quest to “scientifically prove” that Black people are genetically inferior to whites.

It can be applied to anyone who has received accolades in a specific scientific field, not just a Nobel Prize, but then became convinced of their own infallible genius smartness of geniusness and started blathering all manner of tripe from their face-holes.

Jordan Peterson was at one time a highly regarded clinical psychologist who taught at Harvard. In 2018 or thereabouts, he quit being a psychologist and started promoting all kinds of woo nonsense: he became a climate change denier, started claiming that certain races are inherently superior to others (I don’t know why this is such a fixture of Nobelitis, but like quack-medicine woo, eugenicist woo is very common amongst those who believe their super geniusness makes everything that wanders through their heads some kind of oracular truth), alpha-male nonsense, and of course his bizarre pseudoscientific COVID nonsense that damn near got him killed.

Eugenics and medical woo, man. It’s always eugenics and medical woo.

It doesn’t help that he also became a drug addict around 2019 or so, and ended up with a permanent medical disability called akathisia as a result of his drug addiction.

That’s the first bit.

The second bit is his compulsive need to be revered that his fellow instructors at Harvard described as “cult-like” and “cult leader.”

It’s gotten him into a fair bit of trouble over the years. He’s been sanctioned multiple times over inappropriate boundaries with his own patients, over revealing confidential medical details of some patients he took a dislike to (and in one case openly mocking a former patient on a podcast), and of needing attention and validation.

When he discovered he could get that attention and validation from young white alt-right men with daddy issues, he leaned into alt-right politics, especially when he started telling disaffected white men that they are the true victims of oppression, that inequality and eternal class struggle is normal and natural, and that structural oppression doesn’t exist—it’s simply the natural consequence of the “fact” that whites are superior to everyone else.

So yeah. Nobelitis, drug addiction, cult-like need for validation…there you go.”